Ahead of his election, he promised to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office.
And he has warned drug dealers in particular: "Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you."
Last weekend he reiterated that blunt view, as he defended the extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals.
How does someone this fucked up get elected? I thought the US had it bad with Trump.
There is a pretty big difference between the authorization of a single extrajudicial killing in a specific case and the broad admonition of your citizens to go out and kill anyone they suspect of being a drug dealer.
I don't think there's anything extremist about criticism of extrajudicial executions, regardless of their number.
There was a time when a scandal like Watergate would bring down a President. Nowadays, authorising the extrajudicial execution of an American citizen seems acceptable.
You're comparing a few politically motivated extrajudicial executions (which are not excusable, mind you) with the leader of a country promoting vigilantism to the entire citizenry. I'm not sure you realize how quickly the latter situation could devolve compared to the former.
I think some people know exactly what that situation involves and they are inviting it with open eyes.
When you want to stay clean, you have others do the dirty work.
The ones that volunteer for the dirty work are usually regarded as equally disposable as those getting "cleaned."
Those calling for volunteers view this as a transitional period, from which they will emerge, unscathed. Unscathed, why? Madness is not to be ruled out. Nor hubris.
Not just with the political situation in the US, but in other maligned places like China (which has recently had conflicts with the Philippines over parts of the South China Sea) and Russia, which is blamed for every single societal ill these days it seems (Hillary seems to think Putin is the head of the 'alt-right' movement).
For years, RT, a Russian-government controlled broadcaster, has been pushing left-wing propaganda favoring the Democrats. Of course, you've never heard about that, but you've heard about Putin recently supporting some right-wing groups. Could it be because one benefits the political narrative of most journalists but the other does not?
Putin uses his propaganda machine to support whatever he thinks serves his interests at that time. This year it's a soft-on-Russia Trump. A few years before, it was the soft-on-Russia Democrats. I promise it'll never be Mitt Romney or John McCain though.
And in general, it's a little amusing seeing the American Left suddenly discover this year that they are anti-Russian cold-warriors, after decades of being the exact opposite.
> RT, a Russian-government controlled broadcaster, has been pushing left-wing propaganda
Having seen/read a bunch of RT, I don't think that's true. It's propaganda, but it's whatever suits the Kremlin at the time, usually framing issues in ways that favor them. Certainly, favoring Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Assad is not "left-wing propaganda", as easy examples.
> Certainly, favoring Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Assad is not "left-wing propaganda", as easy examples.
Didn't you hear? Putin invaded the Ukraine because he wanted to setup a bunch organic grocery stores and yoga studios? He's really a left-wing kinda guy! /s
It's crazy but true, and it makes perfect sense- Trump said that in the event of a Russian invasion of a NATO member nation, he would consider standing up to Russia and honoring America's NATO obligations, but only if the other alliance members could pony up the cash for it first.
That's got to be music to Putin's ears. All Clinton had to do was assert that yes, the US would honor military alliances that it actively belongs to, and she instantly became the more hawkish one where Russia is concerned. What a crazy freaking world we live in, and not in a good way sometimes.
I'm Russian, and I've heard plenty about how Putin regime supports far right-wing in Europe from Russian sources for several years now. Russian lefties (the actual ones, who call themselves "socialists" and really mean it, Marx in hand - not what you call that in US) are especially vigilant in that regard, and will bring it up whenever they do something like inviting leaders of far-right parties for a conference.
Russia essentially is, in many respects, what European and American far right desires to be (which is why they generally tend to have a positive opinion of it). Its propaganda, both inside and outside, is clearly reminiscent of that - for example, the usual topics of "Western decadence" are brought up a lot, with the implication that Russia has nothing to worry in that regard. Naturally, these kinds of opinions lend to political alliances with far-right Western parties that share a lot of the same worries.
First, do you remember when the US engineered the Orange and Rose 'revolutions'? Or when the US incited Saakashvili to go to war with Russia?
As for Syria, I don't see what you could possibly blame Russia for there, except preventing a genocide of the few Christians and non-Sunni Muslims that are left there.
Hard to tell if you are serious, sarcastic, or a troll.
For anyone not familiar with it, the above repeats Russian propaganda like it's straight out of the manual (though I hadn't heard the DNC hack one before, but that's a pretty new topic). Unfortunately, the facts don't cooperate.
Russia does pay teams of astroturfers; perhaps I've met one! What's it like to work there? HN readers would be very curious to know.
Nice rebuttal. Ignore the facts, accuse me of being a paid troll.
It's ok, you probably don't follow world news beyond the occasional CNN sound bite.
Its pretty damn amazing how few people remember the colour revolutions of a few years ago, or the many other times the US has overthrown foreign governments.
Probably I follow world news more, and at a more sophisticated level, than anyone you know (besides journalists on that beat or practitioners, and possibly not even then).
The difference is that the Phillipenes is a backwater with limited influence. A Filipino strongman's influence is local, and if he causes trouble with China or Japan, he can be curbed.
A guy like Trump, who shoots from the hip and cannot take advice is easily manipulated by somebody like Putin or any number of others who has a better grasp of the subtleties of power. The impact of that when you're talking about the United States is scary.
Trump is a street fighter. He could be a good governor by using the bully pulpit to whip local people into line, and develop a cadre of .gov people with a clue. But the presidency is over his head, and his trusted advisors who were running construction projects and golf courses will drown in the federal bureaucracy.
The opinion of a lot of Phillipinos is that if they simply arrest them, the criminals will weasel out. Either via bribes or lawyers. Killing them on the spot "solves" that problem.
Considering he's doing exactly what he said he'd do, I'd say the people got what they asked for.
The policy I find even more interesting is where he tells the populace to take matters into their own hands and do the killings themselves. I think he said he'd pardon anyone that kills a drug dealer.
People who are afraid and misinformed/have poor judgement love to have an authoritative figure who promises to harm those who they are afraid of.
This is the same mentality of germans who elected Hitler and Americans who are voting for Trump. "You should be afraid of X, I'm going to bring physical harm to X, I'm your savior." Many people respond positively to this in a primal way, because it simplifies/validates their feelings.
If you've been to the Philippines or read up on their history, the country is rife with corruption and extreme levels of inequality ever since the days of Marcos.
The people are tired of the status quo and voted in a hardliner in hopes to change things. When Duterte was mayor of Davao City, he transformed the city into one of the safest in the world:
The hope is that this will be a system shock that will expunge the crime and corruption that plagues this country. It's probably wishful thinking that after all this that normal rule of law will be easily established. The pendulum always swings too far. There will be a hangover.
That's always the hope. This vigilantism is a symptom of decades of rotting institutions.
Maybe a fraction of this wave of violence's victims were guilty of bona fide crimes. But most were politically-convenient targets. I don't know of a single country, in history, that recovered from a similar event inside two generations.
> This vigilantism is a symptom of decades of rotting institutions
The institutions have been growing stronger for decades, I think. It's a slow process, but democracy only began 30 years ago and has been progressing since then.
I read a translation of Njal's Saga while on a trip to Iceland. It was basically the story of a decades-long blood feud. That's what came to mind when I read this article.
I think you'd have to be incredibly naive to think all of those people are drug dealers, let alone the moral problems with executing people for being addicts, or the absurdity of banning drugs in the first place.
Otherwise, the important context to have is that while 1,800 alleged drug dealers have been killed by police and vigilantes in the 7 weeks that Duterte has been in power (roughly 1,200 people were killed last year by police in the U.S. though that doesn't count for all in-custody deaths [0]) -- the Filipino citizens are, by most accounts, supportive of the killing campaign:
> Richard Javad Heydarian, who teaches political science at De La Salle University in Manila, said many members of the public were giving Mr. Duterte wide leeway to deliver on his promise to suppress the drug scourge within three to six months. Mr. Duterte’s “shock and awe” approach reflects not only his commitment to eradicating drugs, Mr. Heydarian said, but also extremely high public expectations.
> “The more fundamental question at this point is, why the seemingly unprecedented support for the new president despite global criticism of his uncompromising approach?” he said. “I think it largely has to do with dissipated public trust in existing judicial institutions, a sense that the normal democratic processes are not coping with the magnitude of the crisis.”
DISCLAIMER: I am a Filipino and I live in the Philippines.
Oh please not this crap again! People outside the Philippines are greatly misinformed by the media. Duterte did not order to kill everyone on drugs. That's bullshit! 600K+ that surrendered are proof of that. The problem is it seems all homicide and murders are now Duterte's fault which is what the news emphasized.
If you want to know what's really going on come to the Philippines. Don't judge based on what the news says.
Also, take into account that there's politics involve here. Oligarchs who have been controlling the country for decades hates Duterte because he wants Philippines to become Federal -- no monopoly anymore.
If Duterte did not won, we are in status quo right now. You will not hear this kind of crap in the news until we are a full-pledge narco state.
Western media based their report on our local media here which are largely owned by the same Oligarchs who wants Duterte out.
Did anyone of you know that during the past administration of President Aquino the crime rate increased to 350%? Yeah not kidding and nobody talks about this. Did all of you know that there were 1,819 killed in 2010 and 2,089 in 2011 by "riding-in-tandem" (crimes perpetrated by more than one person, usually two men, on a motorcycle)? Well nobody gives a shit back then, not the Human Rights or the Media. There were no "kill list".
Your background information of the previous administration is much appreciated. However, I don't think that that excuses any of the actions of the current administration.
You aren't pragmatic enough. Syndicated crime sets up the equivalent of parallel governments inside of your country. They compromise the integrity of your people by taking advantage of weakness and fostering distrust.
There is nothing to negotiate: you give these people money and they will just want more. You give in to their demands, or ignore them, and you become a part of the problem. A war suddenly becomes a lot more tempting to wage...
When people do drugs for at least 6 months, their brains don't function well that they could rape young children, sell all their stuffs in exchange for drugs, kill the taxi drivers and all the crimes that can come in your imagination. They will do whatever they want (which includes killings) for their own needs since they're already retarded addict and since a lot of people do drugs the crime rate gets to increase rapidly. Look now, the crime rate just got lowered except for the drug related crimes that is happening now since drug lords would kill all the people they do not trust and do everything just to avoid the consequence that could happen when they got caught. There's no joke about the actions of the current government.
Sorry, but Duterte has literally gone on record to state that even normal citizens should kill drug addicts:
"If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful."
You literally sound like Trump supporters who bash the 'media' because they take his 'words out of context', when he does in fact, say those things clear as day.
If you even read my comment, I'm not even comparing Duterte to Trump, I'm comparing your logic to Trump's supporters' logic of holier than-thou, media is biased non-sense.
Yes the media can be biased, but in this case, he was quoted word for word (and he's basing his platform on that, so you can't just say the media is misrepresenting him)
Anyway regardless, I don't want to get to an extended discussion with you, as you seem deeply entrenched with your views.
> And he has warned drug dealers in particular: "Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you."
This is a strong message. And he used the media to spread this message. I'm not jiving with the idea that the media is wrong and yet the president was using the media as a channel for this message.
I also live in the Philippines, but I'm a foreigner and I'm not taking a side on this. My boots on the ground observation is that people have been shot under mysterious circumstances before the new president took office and the same is happening now after, but maybe at a greater rate. But I don't fear for my life here. It isn't the wild west with guns blazing on the street.
That's a threat. If you are living here you will notice that criminals doesn't fear the law before Duterte took office. Why would they? Corruption is from top to bottom that nobody gives a shit what would happen to ordinary people.
There's a documentary video where the head PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency) said that are ordered not to arrest drug pushers even if they know who and where they are. Obviously the order came from the top.
> There's a documentary video where the head PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency) said that are ordered not to arrest drug pushers even if they know who and where they are.
I wonder what did the previous administration did about drugs. Then when Duterte was elected, thousands of drug pushers and users surrendered. It seems too obvious that there were a lot of government officials were involved since the law had been almost optional for the people to do crime while drug lords are running their business inside a luxury jail. Since this is a war, lots of people will die and some of them are innocent.
Why couldn't he use this huge public push to reform the courts and simply arrest and prosecute the whole drug-pusher military industrial complex? If he has the military power to kill everyone, he has the military power to imprison and document everyone's transgressions. Why is there so much support for police being able to kill people without much documentation? In an environment where a given administration can pretty much kill anyone they want, why would you expect them to not take advantage and eliminate rivals?
I get that drugs are a problem, but why the support for extrajudicial killings when you have the resources to arrest, prosecute, and document?
First, we are not federal/parliament. The public has no power here. Second, Duterte wants to operate within the bounds of the law that's why he doesn't simply kill anyone. Third, nobody supports extrajudicial killings. The problem is the media and human rights made it to look that way. They emphasized and generalized that all killings are the same. Remember that the Oligarchs owned the media and the one heading Human Rights is pro-Oligarchs. Basically all homicide and murders is now Duterte's fault. There was even an article in Time magazine that insisted that it's all Duterte's fault. It's all political.
> First, we are not federal/parliament. The public has no power here.
Apparently you have power to get someone voted into office that can then make pretty big moves within the political apparatus of the country. Could you expand on the idea of "no power" here? You literally have no legislative body? Mass murder or complete political gridlock are the only two options?
> The problem is the media and human rights made it to look that way.
So you're saying that there hasn't been a big bump in homicide rates at the same time as the new president has been saying he's going to kill a bunch of people? I mean, maybe the media is warping the picture. But how do you account for that pile of dead bodies over there?
I'm just not clear of your argument here. Oligarchs control the media so these dead bodies are fakes, and to hell with due process because the public only has the power of a gun?
We can vote, yes, but that's it. After that we rely if the leaders that we voted will actually perform their duties. Our legislative, Judicial and Executive branches of the government are largely influenced by the Oligarchs before Duterte took office. We have selective justice here. People running can defy a TRO (temporary restraining order) just what happened a few years back then the head of Legislative, De Lima, defied the TRO given by Judiciary. That was during the Aquino administration. It was also during the Aquino term that he bribe the Senate to impeach Justice Corona who is the head of Judiciary. This was all in the news back then but was quickly buried. There were masacres of farmers before. 1,819 killed in 2010 and 2,089 in 2011 by "riding-in-tandem" (crimes perpetrated by more than one person, usually two men, on a motorcycle) but was quickly buried too. There are a lot of injustice that has been going on here that you don't see in the news. Oligarchs-owned media have been covering it up ever since.
During the previous Aquino administration crime rate increase to 350% but that did not made news. Most of these crimes are drug related. Information were being controlled by our local media.
Due process are given to those who surrendered. In front of a drug suspect holding a gun, what do you want to police to do talk them to death?
"People outside the Philippines are greatly misinformed by the media."
I'm not sure that the people inside the country are any better informed. For one thing, I'm curious as to how you were presented with the "600K+ surrendered" figure. That number sounds very high to me. Where are all these people now?
All details aside, sorry, but whereas once your country was on my 'to visit' list, it's been crossed off now. This situation must be costing a bucket of tourist dollars.
Why are you concerned with your safety now where crime rate is 45% down? You should've come here before Duterte took office so that you will experience the "laglag bala" or bullet scam in the airport.
> If you want to know what's really going on come to the Philippines. Don't judge based on what the news says.
You say this like we're such a beautiful country whose drinking water doesn't make people in rich countries sick. And no, they aren't likely to come here with all the violence and the supportiveness of people like you. We'll probably get a travel ban by other countries and have a crashing tourism industry.
Last I checked, oligarchs are still in control. PLDT has a monopoly on telephone lines. Meralco has a monopoly on electricity. The Lopezes are dominating TV entertainment. The Ayalas own the business districts and have the top real estate projects and banks in the country. And you, you're still where you were before Duterte became president. Arroyo got away with corruption. Peter Lim fled the country despite accusations on pushing drugs. People are still poor, hungry, unschooled.
Nothing's changed. You just worship Duterte too much.
Nothing changed, really?! How about crime rate down to 45%? Freedom of Information is signed. A free 911 implemented. 8888 to call for corrupt politicians. Laglag bala scam gone. etc etc...
If you can't see changes today then you have problem. And really, you expect everything to change upside down in just 2 months? Are you on drugs?
600K+ that surrendered did so out of fear for their lives. However, mattquiros doesn't seem like he's one of those who surrendered. So should he be fearing for his life right now? If "being on drugs" is enough of a risk that over half a million people surrendered, then what is accusing someone of being on drugs?
The Philippines love authoritarian figures. The son of Ferdinand Marcos (dictator who instated martial law, under which the country was plunged into a climate of repression and plunder), Bong Bong Marcos almost won the vice presidency with a 0.64 percent difference.
The president was already doing this in Davao before being elected to the national office. And this was already happening throughout the country. It's sort of an open secret that in the Philippines you can bump someone off for PHP 10K.
I'm guessing that a lot of these killings are sort of cover for other issues. This person is a drug user, but also owes the wrong people a lot of money. It's just an expansion of targets for people who were already employed in the industry. Business is getting good.
I don't know if there is any real strategy here since the president was already doing this as mayor of Davao and this sort of became a platform to run on. Another platform was to fight corruption, a major problem in the Philippines.
As you can see from the list, there are a lot of public officials allegedly involved in the drug trade. Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption. You work to seriously constrain the availability of drugs due to fear among dealers and users and that cuts off the supply of money to the top. At the same time you hit the top through your intelligence sources. Drug related corruption gets squeezed from both sides. As this is the more brutal stage, the fear of being involved in corruption spreads to non-drug related corruption.
> It's sort of an open secret that in the Philippines you can bump someone off for PHP 10K.
That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there something to back that up?
> The president was already doing this in Davao before being elected to the national office. And this was already happening throughout the country
I've read the former many times, but never the latter.
> Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption.
I don't see how murder, a refusal to punish murderers, and the effective elimination of rule of law and the judiciary is going to stop corruption. It's the worst possible corruption, and it's a fantasy that the person perpetrating this policy is somehow going to be otherwise honest, or that society, without these critical institutions, will be better able to deal with corruption.
It's ok to kill people, just don't embezzle any money?
There's also the minor problem of the complete disregard for individual life and liberty, which is harming a huge number of people.
>> It's sort of an open secret that in the Philippines you can bump someone off for PHP 10K.
> That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there something to back that up?
That's about $215 US, for the record. From the time I spent in Davao back when Duterte was mayor: no one I met was afraid of any crime, certainly not some weird public assassination market. The only people that you'd ever have to worry about were police, and that was only if you were a criminal yourself.
That being said, that was back when he was a somewhat crazy mayor and not President. So maybe there's been a shift in the politics and perception of these things? I can say the city was tremendously livable and while there was some anxiety about him and the extrajudicial killings, it was offset by dramatically reduced worries about normal crime for everyone I spoke to about it (which says a lot, I think -- WHAT it says is a bit more complicated).
To be fair, there are many places where the police do shady things, but a certain segment of the population don't see any issue with it because it's always those "other" people feeling the brunt of it and "they were probably up to no good anyways."
There are many white people that feel this way about police violence against black people in the US. "Well, they were black so they were probably up to no good; therefore the police only do bad things to bad people."
Who says who is a criminal? Are Filipino police somehow far more gifted than those elsewhere and are completely non-corrupt (never using their powers for other than justice), and never arrest the wrong person?
It's safe as long as you are not the one getting killed. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin offered similar security.
I was speaking to the nature of their anxiety, not the probability they'd be killed or by whom. I was also trying to describe their perceptions, not the objective state of affairs. I think you'll find your comment to be oddly hostile and non-responsive.
While I don't agree with your characterization of your prior comment (at least as it was written, of course I don't know your intent), I'm sorry you felt my response was hostile; that's not what I meant to convey.
Did you not read the "open secret" part? While it may or may not be true, you're going to have a hard time finding an "official" source for that kind of open secret.
This is how Philippines has chosen to solve it's own societal problems, and is none of HN's or UN's business. I won't put judgement on it, but Philippine's people deserve to experience the consequences of their own choices, and not have other's views foisted onto them.
This is part of the reaction against globalism, and centralisation of power. Le Pen, Trump, Brexit, Duerte. People, and collections of people have a right to choose to do things differently from what the rest of the world considers normal and acceptable.
Those viewing Duerte as a figure who is centralising power in the Philippines into himself are viewing things upside down. This is a revolt against the United Nations, against "human rights agreements" between countries, against focusing on appearance of being good to the rest of the world. This is the pendulum swinging from globalism back to nationalism. This is a nation whose people is choosing the method to solve it's own problems, ignoring what we think of it, and we have no right to intervene.
Countries must be allowed to make their own choices. Their nationalistic tendencies must be protected. Things must exist separately, before they can be together. Without this separateness, and expecting every country to become globalised and be governed in the same way, like food in a giant blender, it's called narcissism.
Stop viewing things from your own lens.
Stop trying to look good to yourself. Cast political correctness away. Focus on the actual underlying reality.
The problem is that some (perhaps many) of those people did not make that choice, but still have to suffer the consequences imposed on them by the majority that did. And when you say that it's not our business to intervene into their internal matters, or even judge them, you completely ignore those people.
Rights of the collective do not trump rights of individuals.
So is that the logic we use to impose the ideas of the majority of the rest of the world on Philippines? Is oppression by majority solved by more oppression by a bigger majority? What kind of logic is that?
> Is oppression by majority solved by more oppression by a bigger majority? What kind of logic is that?
If mob rule is sufficient, then yes, mob rule by a larger mob would be right. If mob rule is insufficient, then the behavior of the Phillipines isn't justified, and so yes, can be corrected by other outside groups. In either case: the Phillipines' behavior is unjustified.
That maybe so, but intervention of other groups cannot be justified, if Philippine's behaviour to intervene in the unjustified behaviour of drug dealers is itself unjustified. If mob rule is unjustified, then using a larger mob would be even more unjustified, no?
> then using a larger mob would be even more unjustified, no?
It isn't justified by virtue of its size, but that doesn't mean it's unjustified. It may be justified for other reasons—humanitarian aid, for instance.
>> So is that the logic we use to impose the ideas of the majority of the rest of the world on Philippines? Is oppression by majority solved by more oppression by a bigger majority? What kind of logic is that?
Pretty straightforward logic, actually. If the entirety of my oppression of you is preventing you from oppressing someone else, that is the right and proper kind of oppression. There's direct analogy here with the use of violence in self-defense: violence initiated by the attacker is bad, violence used by the victim or a third party in defense of the victim is good.
In reality, it's often not so simple, but you can still rank the parties on who is "more right", and whose oppression is more justified, so to speak.
So yeah, sometimes you need the majority to oppress the hell out of some smaller majority to make them behave. Good examples include US Civil War, WW2, and the use of National Guard in US to impose federal desegregation laws during the Civil Rights Era. A good example of a failure to do so, and its moral consequences, is the Rwandan genocide.
Now, this all was a hypothetical - I'm not saying that an invasion of the Philippines would be justified on these grounds. Of course not! But what they're doing certainly justifies, at the very least, a condemnation - and it would be immoral to not judge. Same exact kind of immoral as turning away and muttering "not my business" or "she might deserve it anyway" when your neighbor is beating his wife.
The 'oppressed' we are talking about are meth dealers who have spread the drug such that up to 30% of those who live in slums have become addicts. Entire communities destroyed. Filipinos follow your exact same logic, decide the behaviour of these drug dealers is unjustified and must be stopped at all costs. Who am I to judge whether killing these drug dealers is right, or is not right? Meth has not affected my family but it has destroyed theirs! And likewise, if you are the general of a foreign army and do decide to invade them to stop it, who am I to judge you for trying to prevent death of innocents? In both cases I will observe, and if you are in my community, which you are, I will give you my perspective and my advice, but I will never intervene. I will not support or intervene Filipinos efforts to save their communities, nor your hypothetical efforts to invade them. It is my business to advise only so much because we and other commenters are in the same community.
I think that is our moral difference and if you would judge me for it, I will accept it graciously.
It appears that you have completely missed the point of all the complaints. The oppressed that we're talking about are not drug dealres - they're people accused of being drug dealers, which may be right or wrong, but either way we will never know if they're just murdered in cold blood without having their time in the court of law. Rule of law exists for a reason, and part of that reason is to protect the innocent who inevitably end up targeted by vigilantes in witch hunts. In many cases, the witch hunts spiral out of control to such an extent that most people are innocent (of what they're accused of, anyway), simply because it becomes a cheap and easy way to settle scores.
Another point that I'd like to make, is that you talk about communities. But, who draws the lines? There's a community of Filipinos, true - but who decides who is the member, and does being a member of that community automatically excludes one from other communities? I would dare say that it does not; and if so, why should that other membership be ignored? I mean, ultimately, we are all members of one community called "people", spanning the entire globe; everything else is a subdivision of that. So, if it's common membership that you believe to give the moral justification to judge, and possibly intervene, then it is membership in that community that I will claim as my justification to do so.
For me, the membership of the community means you can talk to them directly. And even if we'e in the same community, I will never judge, and never intervene, unless you're directly harming another member of my community. I do not talk to the people in the slums, we're not in the same community. I talk to you, we're in the same one.
I hold no judgement on what's happening in Philippines, just as I cannot think of intervening in U.S., or judge U.S. citizens, where prisons where millions, a significant fraction of them innocent, are incarcerated in horrific conditions I could never imagine myself to be in.
Rule of law is an invention, sometimes it has force, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it changes.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadHow does someone this fucked up get elected? I thought the US had it bad with Trump.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
You already have it bad, regardless of who you elect this time.
There was a time when a scandal like Watergate would bring down a President. Nowadays, authorising the extrajudicial execution of an American citizen seems acceptable.
When you want to stay clean, you have others do the dirty work.
The ones that volunteer for the dirty work are usually regarded as equally disposable as those getting "cleaned."
Those calling for volunteers view this as a transitional period, from which they will emerge, unscathed. Unscathed, why? Madness is not to be ruled out. Nor hubris.
One is promoting it directly: by inciting the citizenry to murder.
The other is promoting it indirectly: by shamelessly engaging in it himself.
Yes, the former is worse. But they're both evil, and both are social poison.
Not just with the political situation in the US, but in other maligned places like China (which has recently had conflicts with the Philippines over parts of the South China Sea) and Russia, which is blamed for every single societal ill these days it seems (Hillary seems to think Putin is the head of the 'alt-right' movement).
http://blog.adl.org/extremism/american-white-supremacists-at...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/putin-follower-appear-us-white-supr...
https://antifascistnews.net/2015/12/21/racists-today-why-is-...
Instead you choose to highlight parties that Putin doesn't support, and US parties that aren't actually part of the 'alt-right'.
All it shows is that you bought into Hillary's propaganda.
Putin uses his propaganda machine to support whatever he thinks serves his interests at that time. This year it's a soft-on-Russia Trump. A few years before, it was the soft-on-Russia Democrats. I promise it'll never be Mitt Romney or John McCain though.
And in general, it's a little amusing seeing the American Left suddenly discover this year that they are anti-Russian cold-warriors, after decades of being the exact opposite.
Having seen/read a bunch of RT, I don't think that's true. It's propaganda, but it's whatever suits the Kremlin at the time, usually framing issues in ways that favor them. Certainly, favoring Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Assad is not "left-wing propaganda", as easy examples.
Didn't you hear? Putin invaded the Ukraine because he wanted to setup a bunch organic grocery stores and yoga studios? He's really a left-wing kinda guy! /s
That's got to be music to Putin's ears. All Clinton had to do was assert that yes, the US would honor military alliances that it actively belongs to, and she instantly became the more hawkish one where Russia is concerned. What a crazy freaking world we live in, and not in a good way sometimes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/donald-trump-f...
Russia essentially is, in many respects, what European and American far right desires to be (which is why they generally tend to have a positive opinion of it). Its propaganda, both inside and outside, is clearly reminiscent of that - for example, the usual topics of "Western decadence" are brought up a lot, with the implication that Russia has nothing to worry in that regard. Naturally, these kinds of opinions lend to political alliances with far-right Western parties that share a lot of the same worries.
I don't see this at all, other than things Russia does (in Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, and DNC computers).
As for Syria, I don't see what you could possibly blame Russia for there, except preventing a genocide of the few Christians and non-Sunni Muslims that are left there.
Concerning the DNC 'hack', most of the new evidence points to it being a leak, not a hack. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/julian-assange-more-cl...
But yes, blame Russia for everything.
PS. Have you seen Victor Yushchenko's face lately? He's looking pretty good.
For anyone not familiar with it, the above repeats Russian propaganda like it's straight out of the manual (though I hadn't heard the DNC hack one before, but that's a pretty new topic). Unfortunately, the facts don't cooperate.
Russia does pay teams of astroturfers; perhaps I've met one! What's it like to work there? HN readers would be very curious to know.
It's ok, you probably don't follow world news beyond the occasional CNN sound bite.
Its pretty damn amazing how few people remember the colour revolutions of a few years ago, or the many other times the US has overthrown foreign governments.
A guy like Trump, who shoots from the hip and cannot take advice is easily manipulated by somebody like Putin or any number of others who has a better grasp of the subtleties of power. The impact of that when you're talking about the United States is scary.
Trump is a street fighter. He could be a good governor by using the bully pulpit to whip local people into line, and develop a cadre of .gov people with a clue. But the presidency is over his head, and his trusted advisors who were running construction projects and golf courses will drown in the federal bureaucracy.
Considering he's doing exactly what he said he'd do, I'd say the people got what they asked for.
The policy I find even more interesting is where he tells the populace to take matters into their own hands and do the killings themselves. I think he said he'd pardon anyone that kills a drug dealer.
This is the same mentality of germans who elected Hitler and Americans who are voting for Trump. "You should be afraid of X, I'm going to bring physical harm to X, I'm your savior." Many people respond positively to this in a primal way, because it simplifies/validates their feelings.
The people are tired of the status quo and voted in a hardliner in hopes to change things. When Duterte was mayor of Davao City, he transformed the city into one of the safest in the world:
http://touristspotsfinder.com/2015/05/davao-city-safest-city...
http://www.numbeo.com/crime/city_result.jsp?country=Philippi...
Maybe a fraction of this wave of violence's victims were guilty of bona fide crimes. But most were politically-convenient targets. I don't know of a single country, in history, that recovered from a similar event inside two generations.
Revolution would have been more productive.
The institutions have been growing stronger for decades, I think. It's a slow process, but democracy only began 30 years ago and has been progressing since then.
Why do you think this is a "moral problem"?
They didn't become addicts by accident, they chose to break the law by taking drugs.
Otherwise, the important context to have is that while 1,800 alleged drug dealers have been killed by police and vigilantes in the 7 weeks that Duterte has been in power (roughly 1,200 people were killed last year by police in the U.S. though that doesn't count for all in-custody deaths [0]) -- the Filipino citizens are, by most accounts, supportive of the killing campaign:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/world/asia/philippines-rod...
> Richard Javad Heydarian, who teaches political science at De La Salle University in Manila, said many members of the public were giving Mr. Duterte wide leeway to deliver on his promise to suppress the drug scourge within three to six months. Mr. Duterte’s “shock and awe” approach reflects not only his commitment to eradicating drugs, Mr. Heydarian said, but also extremely high public expectations.
> “The more fundamental question at this point is, why the seemingly unprecedented support for the new president despite global criticism of his uncompromising approach?” he said. “I think it largely has to do with dissipated public trust in existing judicial institutions, a sense that the normal democratic processes are not coping with the magnitude of the crisis.”
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...
Oh please not this crap again! People outside the Philippines are greatly misinformed by the media. Duterte did not order to kill everyone on drugs. That's bullshit! 600K+ that surrendered are proof of that. The problem is it seems all homicide and murders are now Duterte's fault which is what the news emphasized.
If you want to know what's really going on come to the Philippines. Don't judge based on what the news says.
Also, take into account that there's politics involve here. Oligarchs who have been controlling the country for decades hates Duterte because he wants Philippines to become Federal -- no monopoly anymore.
If Duterte did not won, we are in status quo right now. You will not hear this kind of crap in the news until we are a full-pledge narco state.
Care to share some additional background to bend the narrative in a different direction than we may usually hear?
Did anyone of you know that during the past administration of President Aquino the crime rate increased to 350%? Yeah not kidding and nobody talks about this. Did all of you know that there were 1,819 killed in 2010 and 2,089 in 2011 by "riding-in-tandem" (crimes perpetrated by more than one person, usually two men, on a motorcycle)? Well nobody gives a shit back then, not the Human Rights or the Media. There were no "kill list".
There is nothing to negotiate: you give these people money and they will just want more. You give in to their demands, or ignore them, and you become a part of the problem. A war suddenly becomes a lot more tempting to wage...
When people do drugs for at least 6 months, their brains don't function well that they could rape young children, sell all their stuffs in exchange for drugs, kill the taxi drivers and all the crimes that can come in your imagination. They will do whatever they want (which includes killings) for their own needs since they're already retarded addict and since a lot of people do drugs the crime rate gets to increase rapidly. Look now, the crime rate just got lowered except for the drug related crimes that is happening now since drug lords would kill all the people they do not trust and do everything just to avoid the consequence that could happen when they got caught. There's no joke about the actions of the current government.
"If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful."
You literally sound like Trump supporters who bash the 'media' because they take his 'words out of context', when he does in fact, say those things clear as day.
Yes the media can be biased, but in this case, he was quoted word for word (and he's basing his platform on that, so you can't just say the media is misrepresenting him)
Anyway regardless, I don't want to get to an extended discussion with you, as you seem deeply entrenched with your views.
> And he has warned drug dealers in particular: "Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you."
This is a strong message. And he used the media to spread this message. I'm not jiving with the idea that the media is wrong and yet the president was using the media as a channel for this message.
I also live in the Philippines, but I'm a foreigner and I'm not taking a side on this. My boots on the ground observation is that people have been shot under mysterious circumstances before the new president took office and the same is happening now after, but maybe at a greater rate. But I don't fear for my life here. It isn't the wild west with guns blazing on the street.
There's a documentary video where the head PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency) said that are ordered not to arrest drug pushers even if they know who and where they are. Obviously the order came from the top.
Any links to this video?
I get that drugs are a problem, but why the support for extrajudicial killings when you have the resources to arrest, prosecute, and document?
Apparently you have power to get someone voted into office that can then make pretty big moves within the political apparatus of the country. Could you expand on the idea of "no power" here? You literally have no legislative body? Mass murder or complete political gridlock are the only two options?
> The problem is the media and human rights made it to look that way.
So you're saying that there hasn't been a big bump in homicide rates at the same time as the new president has been saying he's going to kill a bunch of people? I mean, maybe the media is warping the picture. But how do you account for that pile of dead bodies over there?
I'm just not clear of your argument here. Oligarchs control the media so these dead bodies are fakes, and to hell with due process because the public only has the power of a gun?
During the previous Aquino administration crime rate increase to 350% but that did not made news. Most of these crimes are drug related. Information were being controlled by our local media.
Due process are given to those who surrendered. In front of a drug suspect holding a gun, what do you want to police to do talk them to death?
I'm not sure that the people inside the country are any better informed. For one thing, I'm curious as to how you were presented with the "600K+ surrendered" figure. That number sounds very high to me. Where are all these people now?
All details aside, sorry, but whereas once your country was on my 'to visit' list, it's been crossed off now. This situation must be costing a bucket of tourist dollars.
I don't see how the current situation is any better. I can certainly see how it would look like Duterte did more than the other presidents, though.
You say this like we're such a beautiful country whose drinking water doesn't make people in rich countries sick. And no, they aren't likely to come here with all the violence and the supportiveness of people like you. We'll probably get a travel ban by other countries and have a crashing tourism industry.
Last I checked, oligarchs are still in control. PLDT has a monopoly on telephone lines. Meralco has a monopoly on electricity. The Lopezes are dominating TV entertainment. The Ayalas own the business districts and have the top real estate projects and banks in the country. And you, you're still where you were before Duterte became president. Arroyo got away with corruption. Peter Lim fled the country despite accusations on pushing drugs. People are still poor, hungry, unschooled.
Nothing's changed. You just worship Duterte too much.
If you can't see changes today then you have problem. And really, you expect everything to change upside down in just 2 months? Are you on drugs?
If he was, would you murder him?
I'm guessing that a lot of these killings are sort of cover for other issues. This person is a drug user, but also owes the wrong people a lot of money. It's just an expansion of targets for people who were already employed in the industry. Business is getting good.
I don't know if there is any real strategy here since the president was already doing this as mayor of Davao and this sort of became a platform to run on. Another platform was to fight corruption, a major problem in the Philippines.
As you can see from the list, there are a lot of public officials allegedly involved in the drug trade. Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption. You work to seriously constrain the availability of drugs due to fear among dealers and users and that cuts off the supply of money to the top. At the same time you hit the top through your intelligence sources. Drug related corruption gets squeezed from both sides. As this is the more brutal stage, the fear of being involved in corruption spreads to non-drug related corruption.
That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there something to back that up?
> The president was already doing this in Davao before being elected to the national office. And this was already happening throughout the country
I've read the former many times, but never the latter.
> Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption.
I don't see how murder, a refusal to punish murderers, and the effective elimination of rule of law and the judiciary is going to stop corruption. It's the worst possible corruption, and it's a fantasy that the person perpetrating this policy is somehow going to be otherwise honest, or that society, without these critical institutions, will be better able to deal with corruption.
It's ok to kill people, just don't embezzle any money?
There's also the minor problem of the complete disregard for individual life and liberty, which is harming a huge number of people.
> That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there something to back that up?
That's about $215 US, for the record. From the time I spent in Davao back when Duterte was mayor: no one I met was afraid of any crime, certainly not some weird public assassination market. The only people that you'd ever have to worry about were police, and that was only if you were a criminal yourself.
That being said, that was back when he was a somewhat crazy mayor and not President. So maybe there's been a shift in the politics and perception of these things? I can say the city was tremendously livable and while there was some anxiety about him and the extrajudicial killings, it was offset by dramatically reduced worries about normal crime for everyone I spoke to about it (which says a lot, I think -- WHAT it says is a bit more complicated).
There are many white people that feel this way about police violence against black people in the US. "Well, they were black so they were probably up to no good; therefore the police only do bad things to bad people."
Who says who is a criminal? Are Filipino police somehow far more gifted than those elsewhere and are completely non-corrupt (never using their powers for other than justice), and never arrest the wrong person?
It's safe as long as you are not the one getting killed. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin offered similar security.
Did you not read the "open secret" part? While it may or may not be true, you're going to have a hard time finding an "official" source for that kind of open secret.
This is part of the reaction against globalism, and centralisation of power. Le Pen, Trump, Brexit, Duerte. People, and collections of people have a right to choose to do things differently from what the rest of the world considers normal and acceptable.
Those viewing Duerte as a figure who is centralising power in the Philippines into himself are viewing things upside down. This is a revolt against the United Nations, against "human rights agreements" between countries, against focusing on appearance of being good to the rest of the world. This is the pendulum swinging from globalism back to nationalism. This is a nation whose people is choosing the method to solve it's own problems, ignoring what we think of it, and we have no right to intervene.
Countries must be allowed to make their own choices. Their nationalistic tendencies must be protected. Things must exist separately, before they can be together. Without this separateness, and expecting every country to become globalised and be governed in the same way, like food in a giant blender, it's called narcissism.
Stop viewing things from your own lens.
Stop trying to look good to yourself. Cast political correctness away. Focus on the actual underlying reality.
Rights of the collective do not trump rights of individuals.
If mob rule is sufficient, then yes, mob rule by a larger mob would be right. If mob rule is insufficient, then the behavior of the Phillipines isn't justified, and so yes, can be corrected by other outside groups. In either case: the Phillipines' behavior is unjustified.
That maybe so, but intervention of other groups cannot be justified, if Philippine's behaviour to intervene in the unjustified behaviour of drug dealers is itself unjustified. If mob rule is unjustified, then using a larger mob would be even more unjustified, no?
It isn't justified by virtue of its size, but that doesn't mean it's unjustified. It may be justified for other reasons—humanitarian aid, for instance.
Pretty straightforward logic, actually. If the entirety of my oppression of you is preventing you from oppressing someone else, that is the right and proper kind of oppression. There's direct analogy here with the use of violence in self-defense: violence initiated by the attacker is bad, violence used by the victim or a third party in defense of the victim is good.
In reality, it's often not so simple, but you can still rank the parties on who is "more right", and whose oppression is more justified, so to speak.
So yeah, sometimes you need the majority to oppress the hell out of some smaller majority to make them behave. Good examples include US Civil War, WW2, and the use of National Guard in US to impose federal desegregation laws during the Civil Rights Era. A good example of a failure to do so, and its moral consequences, is the Rwandan genocide.
Now, this all was a hypothetical - I'm not saying that an invasion of the Philippines would be justified on these grounds. Of course not! But what they're doing certainly justifies, at the very least, a condemnation - and it would be immoral to not judge. Same exact kind of immoral as turning away and muttering "not my business" or "she might deserve it anyway" when your neighbor is beating his wife.
I think that is our moral difference and if you would judge me for it, I will accept it graciously.
Another point that I'd like to make, is that you talk about communities. But, who draws the lines? There's a community of Filipinos, true - but who decides who is the member, and does being a member of that community automatically excludes one from other communities? I would dare say that it does not; and if so, why should that other membership be ignored? I mean, ultimately, we are all members of one community called "people", spanning the entire globe; everything else is a subdivision of that. So, if it's common membership that you believe to give the moral justification to judge, and possibly intervene, then it is membership in that community that I will claim as my justification to do so.
I hold no judgement on what's happening in Philippines, just as I cannot think of intervening in U.S., or judge U.S. citizens, where prisons where millions, a significant fraction of them innocent, are incarcerated in horrific conditions I could never imagine myself to be in.
Rule of law is an invention, sometimes it has force, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it changes.
That is my moral framework.